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Read Part 1 here:
In regards to Hitler, Pol Pot & Stalin, it is important to point out first that Hitler appears to have not been an atheist at all. He was raised as a Catholic, regularly invoked Jesus in his speeches, and spoke often of his and the German peoples' "manifest destiny" - a decidedly non-atheist position. It is also worth noting that aside from Hitler, the overwhelming majority of Nazi party members were religious, and it was they who committed the crimes of the Nazi party first hand. In addition, the Nazi party also officially banned books that "ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy."
Pol Pot was raised Buddhist, later spent eight years in a Catholic seminary, but was more accurately described as a deist as he professed a belief in "heaven" and "destiny."
Stalin was born into a very religious household and attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary, from which he was expelled. His personal religious beliefs are hard to pin down exactly, however he did publicly advocate the idea that religions were unnecessary and was likely to have been an atheist.
Sam Harris provides a typically lucid explanation regarding the actions of these men:
"People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion - delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself - of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable, or too accepting of rational inquiry."
The above are proof that Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot weren't evil because they were atheists. Their wickedness lies in their psyche.
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